On Wed, Dec 01, 1999 at 11:24:52PM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote: > You are entirely right that programs prohibited by patents > in some countries should not be treated like programs > restricted by their authors. > > gimp-nonfree should be renamed and reclassified as a free non-us > package.
LZW is patented in countries other than the US -- "United States Patent No. 4,558,302, Japanese Patent Numbers 2,123,602 and 2,610,084, and patents in Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom." according to http://corp2.unisys.com/LeadStory/lzwfaq.html The Debian policy -- http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch2.html -- says that non-us is for cryptography that can't legally be exported from the US. But there are countries from which you can export crypto in which the LZW patent is enforced. As a practical matter, I discourage anyone from distributing any GIF files or software to create them. I want GIF to join Betamax, DIVX, and SDMI on the junk pile of formats whose "owners" killed them by trying to keep them proprietary. It will help to make an argument for openness and interoperability that even the most clueless of managers can understand. But if you must have a category for "free software to create a GIF", neither non-us nor non-free seems to apply. -- Don Marti | Free the web. Burn all GIFs. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | You can't spell "software patent reform" http://zgp.org/~dmarti | without "U". whois DM683 | http://burnallgifs.org/
